Many scholars have wrestled with what I call the “first-order question” in patent law: What policies should we adopt to promote innovation? This article grapples with the second-order question: What policies should we adopt to promote innovation about promoting innovation? I argue that...

The literatures on bounded and ecological rationality are built on adaptationism—and its associated modular, cognitivist and computational paradigm—that does not address or explain the evolutionary origins of rationality. We argue that the adaptive mechanisms of evolution are not sufficient...

This paper presents an evolutionary model in which altruists and egoists simultaneously survive natural selection. Successive generations of randomly paired agents play a two-stage game consisting first of a choice of technology and second a choice of effort level. This setting induces a form of...

The paper analyzes how spillovers in the product market affect the incentives of firms to reveal information about their innovative productivity. Such spillovers create a free-rider effect in the patent race that countervails the familiar business-stealing effect. The equilibrium disclosure...

We consider an entrepreneur that is the sole producer of a cost reducing skill, but the entrepreneur that hires a team to use the skill cannot prevent collusive trade for the innovation-related knowledge between employees and competitors. We show that there are two types of diffusion-avoiding...

This paper delves into the effects that strategic representations have on firm performance. It does so in four ways. First, it describes different types of representations—internal, external, and distributed—and it points to their pervasiveness in strategy. Second, it presents a framework to...

The authors examine the timing and quality of product introduction in an R&D stopping game, where they allow for horizontal and vertical differentiation in the product market. They observe that discontinuous changes in introduction dates can occur as firms' abilities as researchers change....

We examine the timing and quality of product introduction in an R&D stopping game, where we allow for horizontal and vertical differentiation in the product market. We observe that discontinuous changes in introduction dates can occur as firms' abilities as researchers change. Further, when the...

The authors examine the timing and quality of product introduction in an R&D stopping game, where they allow for horizontal and vertical differentiation in the product market. They observe that discontinuous changes in introduction dates can occur as firms' abilities as researchers change....

We examine the timing and quality of product introduction in an R&D stopping game, where we allow for horizontal and vertical differentiation in the product market. We observe that discontinuous changes in introduction dates can occur as firms' abilities as researchers change. Further, when the...